Under Trump, we are all women

The same strategies used against women for decades by the Christian right and the anti-abortion movement are now, under Donald Trump's presidency, being turned on the American people as a whole.

“Finally, considering the right's success in capturing state houses, the
ever-rightward tilt of Congress, SCOTUS' recent Hobby Lobby decisions regarding
contraception, and their ruling on buffer zones, prochoice activists must feel
like Roe is as vulnerable as a wildebeest at a watering hole. Indeed, the lions
of the right would certainly like to devour it. Were that the case, then the
religious right's ascendance would bring another tipping point not just for
abortion, but for the very nature of governance in the United States.”–
Douglas Jamiel, July 22, 2014

Capitol Hill in Washington, Friday, Jan. 27, 2017, during the March for Life. Credit: J. Scott Applewhite AP/Press Association Images

Thousands
of people gathered yesterday in Washington, DC, as they have for 44 years, for
what is known as the March for Life. This anti-abortion protest takes place annually near the
anniversary date of the 1973 passage of Roe v. Wade, the US Supreme Court’s
landmark abortion rights decision. Yesterday’s marchers, whether they individually like Trump or
not, were happy, hopeful, and enthusiastic in the knowledge that his
administration is so clearly and explicitly “pro-life.”

The
March was a celebration of the right’s electoral victory, the result of decades
of work that had almost nothing at all to do with Donald Trump or his personal
goals and pathologies. His election has
enabled the religious right’s movement, one that has coalesced around abortion
rights for decades, to gain political power. This march, and not Trump’s
inauguration, should be the focal point for understanding the new
administration’s rejection of modernity, science and secularism, as well as its
undemocratic policy objectives.

This
assertion might mystify people inclined to think, “The problems we face are so
much more than about abortion.” The point isn’t abortion per se, but the model
established by a right wing Christian ideology. It’s a model of strategies and
tactics, arrayed against women’s rights during the past fifty years, now being
applied more broadly. When public harm is going to be done, perpetrators
usually practice first on women and children, to see what society will
tolerate. This situation is no different.

The conservative right’s pro-life
agenda – anti-science, anti-secular, and anti-equality – has been a fertile
practice ground for decades. Religious
ideas infuse personhood for fetus theories, medical truths are ignored and
overlooked, and the deleterious political and economic effects of compulsory
pregnancy on women are trivialized.

Additionally,
the anti-abortion movement’s
use of language and framing also presaged what we see today. In anti-abortion activism, “alternate facts” and “fake news” have
long distorted public understanding with expressions such as “partial-birth
abortions.” Verbal and visual slights of
hand are the lingua franca of the movement.

On a deeper level, however, the
anti-abortion movement starkly illustrates the right’s authoritarian and
anti-democratic core. Despite the intent of individual people, the political anti-abortion movement willfully subsumes women’s
autonomy, privacy, dignity, bodily integrity and moral competence in religious
beliefs about innocence, sin and the promised rewards or punishments of an
afterlife. Hardline religious
conservatives that dominate “pro-life” activism and politics fundamentally assume
that women are to men as men are to god and, as such, that women are subject to
male intervention and governance. In the
same way that biblical notions of gender hierarchy, submission and guardianship
was used to established the basis for racialized slavery, this treatment of
women has been used to establish the basis for undermining broader and
intersectional equality.

Trump is vehicle food to the religious right, whose ideas about gender
hierarchies and roles overlapped just sufficiently enough with his to justify
the rank hypocrisy of purportedly religious people supporting a man who so
thoroughly embodies the abject failure of the compassion, empathy, respect,
dignity and love that they claim to hold so dear. The animating force in this
relationship is hierarchies and status – first based on gender, because it
operates intimately, then on everything else.

Vice President Mike Pence speaks at the March for Life. Credit: Manuel Balce Ceneta AP/Press Association Images

Trump
himself has, over the years, vacillated in his opinions about abortion, but his
Vice President, Mike Pence, and Speaker of the House Paul Ryan have been among
the most vocal and rabid anti-choice advocates in US politics in decades. Under Pence’s governorship, Indiana enacted
draconian laws criminalizing pregnant women in violation of their civil rights. Ryan, a believer
in personhood for fertilized eggs, supported what came to be called the "Let Women
Die Bill" and was recorded
explaining that, after all, rape is simply another method of conception. Both men endorse practices that, despite what
they might say or believe, perpetuate systemic racism and sexism. Both believe,
fundamentally, that men govern and women nurture; men produce, women reproduce.
Information to the contrary, information that challenges status, is
rationalized out of existence.

What is interesting in either case – the right using Trump or Trump using the right
– is the degree to which winners are perceived in terms of dominant and
powerful ‘masculine’ ideals, and losers in terms of defeated, submissive and
weak ‘feminine’ ones. The “pro-life”
movement is steeped in ideas about gender hierarchies and those hierarchies now
define the corruption of democratic ideals.

An
understanding of gender as an ordinal frame of institutional life is important
to parsing how it is that Trump and his administration can so cavalierly seem
to ignore the constitution, a tradition of compromise, and ultimately violate
our rights as citizens.

Many people believe that women’s equality
means giving us access to what men have historically had, need and want. But
gender isn’t only a matter of individual expression or behavior, nor does the
movement of women into traditionally male spheres erase sexism and bias. Ideas about gender, persistently
stereotypical, infuse everything from the organization of labor in homes and at
work to the language and metaphor that shape our thinking. These ideas, to our collective detriment,
remain, overwhelmingly, binary and hierarchical: men and women; higher status
and lower status; public and private; strong and weak; dominant and submissive;
leaders and lead; protectors and nurturers; rational and emotional; public
actors and privately acted upon.

It is in this framework that Trump
is treating the polity in the way that women, threats to their equality and
their “issues”, have been treated. What
women say, experience and need remains minimally consequential to men and the
institutions that they dominate. This approach has been the standard political,
public and media response to gross violations of women’s human and civil rights
for decades – rights that have often been challenged by anti-abortion
politicians.

Men dominate coverage of abortion and other reproductive rights
issues in all media. They are also the
majority of cited and sourced experts.
On US cable programs, Catholic officials are six times more likely to
appear as media experts to discuss abortion than gynecologists or
obstetricians. The last to be consulted, in media or in legislatures, are
women. Media also, for example, failed to explicitly call years of extremist
abortion clinic attacks terrorism, hate crimes or direct challenges to women’s
equality and citizenship.

If, as the result of anti-abortion
violence and laws, women’s rights were degraded, if women were criminalized for
the outcomes of their pregnancies, if their dignity was routinely impugned, if
their lives threatened, if their ability to support themselves and their
families was reduced, and if their freedom of movement and choice were
monitored and restricted, well, there are always more critical Section A
issues. Media has, for years, failed to
consult women and scientists in matters of women’s health and needs or to hold
public office holders accountable to women as citizens. Media is, therefore,
entirely complicit in cultivating a poor public understanding of abortion, one
that hinges on the disingenuous pitting of a woman’s selfish wants against a
“baby’s life.”

This is the same
sort of vacuous “tell both sides” false equivalence that feed widespread
climate denial and the rejection, in the United States, of theories of
evolution. The same standards had the destructive effect, in coverage of Donald
Trump and Hillary Clinton’s candidacies, of suggesting that they were equally
potentially unfit or dangerous. If
women’s rights were considered part of the fundamental scaffolding of
democracy, instead of private matters or negotiable political bargaining chips,
then our culture might not have been as primed to ignore the dangers
represented by Trump’s candidacy or the ascendance of an authoritarian
conservative white supremacist religious right in the White House.

It is an interesting development that what
can be perceived as multiple re-institutionalizations of women’s inequality may
indeed be a symptom of just the opposite, in that men and women, to consider an
unprecedented upside, can now be categorized under the universal generic,
“women,” because that’s how this administration, an administration that puts
white male aggrieved entitlement on display in spectacular and destructive
ways, is going to treat everyone. Equally.

If you are a man, and you find
yourself thinking, “How is what is going on even possible?” congratulations,
you are now a woman. If you are saying, “That makes no sense. It’s not true or
accurate, not medically or scientifically sound,” welcome. If you are wondering why the media persists
in framing critical issues “neutrally” by employing dangerous false
equivalences, it’s nice to have you. If
you wonder how anyone can take senseless language seriously, happy to talk. If
you are enraged that your rights, needs and experiences are being ignored, or
worse, still, if you are being told that others know better what is good for
you, get in line.

We are all women now.

When
Donald Trump outlives his usefulness and popularity, the conservative
leadership of the Republican Party will do their best to make light work of
him, leaving Mike Pence and Paul Ryan to fill offices they could never have
been elected to. Along the way, and via techniques well honed in the battle
against women’s rights and access to safe and legal abortion, great damage will
be done to women, LGTBQ communities, racial, religious and ethnic minorities,
immigrants, the economy and the environment.
In other words, less palatable words, heterosexual white male supremacy
will have politically exerted itself.

About the author

Feminist, writer, and satirist (not always in that order). Advocate for gender equality and women's freedom of expression.

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